More Signs of a Screwed Up System

I sat in a meeting the other day. We were deciding to allow a student to be on a home-based program for health reasons. I know that the area coordinator from the TPS Education Service Center, if she noticed me at all, might have thought I was angry. If I were, it wasn't at her personally.

They decided that the student could "keep up" by completing a computer-based curriculum that, I am sure, is filled with a lot of context-free facts (if it's anything like the computer-based curriculum that we use here). Multiple-choice fun! It's great for training someone to play "Who Wants to be a Millionaire." It's not so great if you want someone to get an education. But it serves as a suitable hoop for our students to jump through, so our school district is content with it.

Then came the kicker for me. If the student has questions or problems understanding what they are "learning," they are to contact strangers at the ECS, not our teachers here, who the student already knows.

This student needs to be at home.  They need to get better.  But our conventions and our laws say the student has to be in school.  Obviously, we have such a low view of learning that we don't think anyone is capable of doing it unless they are either in a school or being overseen by a school.  But the real insanity of this is that the two primary ingredients for learning to take place, those being good ideas and healthy relationships, are not just absent, but REMOVED from the process!  "Here, kid... go sit in front of a computer and play a multiple choice version of Trivial Pursuit.  If you have problems, ask this total stranger who probably cares less about this subject than you do, and see what you can learn from them."

You should have seen the way I was ignored when I voiced my single objection during the meeting:  This is far from how this should be.  The road we are on has brought people to do things that simply don't make sense anymore.